So this was the week I finally broke down and bought some books — I made it nearly a month in London without being forced to, thanks to Skoob Books and the Imperial War Museum. I am only human, it turns out. Norman Angell. The Great Illusion — Now. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. A Penguin Special […]
The degree to which science fiction accurately predicts the future is not really the point; its value is more as an exploration of what people might do and what society might look like if you change things in a few fundamental ways. (And for my purposes, it’s the assumptions underlying a given exploration which are
Actually, that should be “The lodgings of the compiler of the damned”, but it’s more dramatic this way. 39 Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1, just a few blocks from my own lodgings. The word “unprepossessing” could have been coined in honour of this building,1 and there are certainly many far more pleasing buildings too look at
Clive Harris. Walking the London Blitz. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2006. I haven’t been buying lots of travel-type books, but I could hardly pass this one up! Nevil Shute. On the Beach. Geneva: Edito-Service S.A., 1968 [1957]. Finally found it.
The big trip to the UK looms. It’s my first and I’m greatly looking forward to it — all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can’t say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there
A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg. Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that
I’ve been good, I really have! I haven’t bought any books for ages, since I’ve been economising in advance of the UK trip. But yesterday I went looking for a Shute to take with me, and couldn’t find one, but instead came away with an armful of other books. Midge Gillies. Waiting for Hitler: Voices
Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just
It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The
I ordered these before I realised just how broke I’ll be after the UK trip. Oy vey … David Clarke and Andy Roberts. Flying Saucerers: A Social History of Ufology. Loughborough: Alternative Albion, 2007. A social history of British ufology, at any rate. Did you know that Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding believed that UFOs
